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Installing and Using netCDF-C Libraries in Windows

NetCDF-C Libraries in a Windows Environment may be used under multiple sets of circumstances.

There are several development environments available for programmers who develop on Windows.

- Microsoft Visual Studio
- MSYS/MinGW
- Cygwin

For developers using Microsoft Visual Studio, you may download using the Windows build instructions, or you may download the pre-built netCDF-C libraries from this page.

For developers using MSYS/MinGW or Cygwin, you may build netCDF-C using the Linux/Unix build instructions.

> For complex builds that include netCDF-4 and/or DAP support this may prove tricky, as it is time consuming to collect all of the dependencies. In these cases it may be easier to use the pre-built netcdf packages provided by the MSYS and Cygwin environments.

Users who prefer to build the netCDF-C libraries from source in a Windows environment using Microsoft Visual Studio are referred to Build Instructions for NetCDF-C using CMake

# Getting pre-built netCDF-C Libraries for Visual Studio

These libraries have been built using Visual Studio 2017. The downloads are installer packages which contain the netCDF-C libraries and utilities (ncgen, ncgen3, ncdump and nccopy), as well as the associated dependencies.

## Included Dependencies

The included dependencies and versions are as follows:

- libhdf5: 1.12.1
- libcurl: 7.60.0
- zlib: 1.2.8

## Latest Release (netCDF-C 4.10.0)

Configuration | 64-bit
--- | ---
netCDF 3 | netCDF4.10.0-NC3-64.exe
netCDF3+DAP | netCDF4.10.0-NC3-DAP-64.exe
netCDF4 | netCDF4.10.0-NC4-64.exe
netCDF4+DAP | netCDF4.10.0-NC4-DAP-64.exe

# Using the netCDF-C Libraries with Visual Studio

In order to use the netcdf libraries, you must ensure that the .dll files (along with any dependencies from deps/shared/bin) are on the system path. In order to compile a program using these libraries, you must first link your program against the appropriate 'import' (.lib) libraries.

## Install Hierarchy

When installed, the netCDF libraries are placed in the specified locations, along with the netCDF-C utilities and dependencies.

# Notes

The following points should be considered when using the netCDF-C libraries on Windows.

1. When building the netCDF-C libraries with netCDF4 support, using the Debug libraries may cause extraneous warnings. These warnings are related to cross-dll memory management, and appear to be harmless. You can safely ignore them by using the Release libraries. [NCF-220]